good news guys, I made a breakthrough today; got my solution to compile and my function to work in 3ds max (without the functionality of a flow map ofcourse, just some test outputs to see if I can get it to work), so I expect to have something more by the end of the weekend ^^ also, i've decided to upload my shader anyway,…
small update on this: my plugin has finally reached a phase where I can actually give my functions the data they need and have them return processed data in a format i want (took a while to figure out how to return anything other than a true or false, value, but as of now, i can also return bitmaps, and pretty much every…
I just tested the script. I noticed the same points Ace Angel come up with. You might want to put the install instructions in the notepad file though as it was seriously making me feel like an idiot hahah. "I'm sure I remember how to run MS files in max..." Anyway I did a basic flow map to check out the tool itself. First…
@anuxinamoon: yeah the script is incredibly slow when painting fast, which is why i am working on the plugin version :) the idea is to let C++ handle the painting, and get all the data needed for the painting itself (barycentric coordinates, uv coordinates, bitmap data and so on) from maxscript, in a way combining the two…
it's good that you mention that. i probably divided the brush radius by 2 somewhere, to get the radius of the brush, but i probably already pass the correct value from max, so it's half size. I'll fix that, thanks for pointing it out. and yes, the speed of the brush stokes does affect the direction; the direction gets more…
I guess a button could be added to the script that converts the existing 4channel flowmap to a "traditional" 2 channel one. Well it's not a matter of correct or incorrect. The provided shader as it's setup, pans in the U axis I believe. You can tweak it so that it pans in U and V. This makes sense to me for stuff like the…
hmm, how much RAM/GPU do you have? my laptop is pretty shitty and it can handle painting just fine without too many slow downs, but i haven't yet experienced a not responding message. are you executing max as administrator? if not, try that. the script generates and edits in real time four bitmaps in a folder that is…
@norman: thanks; I'm gonna do some flow map usage research before continuing my script, it seems that some tweaking may be more than called for :) about the laginess: sorry about that, but there is really nothing I can do about it; it's the inherent laginess of changing a bitmap in realtime using maxscript. the viewport…
great stuff :) yeah, user-friendliness is what is lacking the most at this point. I'm basically just programming at this point to get the color values right. oh, the latest update features FINALLY correct color values on the x and y channels by the way, you should update :) the rest is just correct implementation in a…
basically explained, a flow map is much like a normal map, only the normals on it are used to offset the animation of a texture, creating the impression of the texture flowing in a particular direction, in this case the direction the normals are pointing to. by using this flow map in a shader designed to incorporate it,…